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Vijay Tatkar's Blog

Wednesday Sep 24, 2008

Sun TechDays is a world tour, where we take our
technologies to around 14 cities around the globe and hold 2 or 3 day
events (plus, typically a University Day) talking about current and
future technologies from Sun.

Typically, the tracks include Java SE,
EE, ME technologies, NetBeans IDE, Open Source, and OpenSolaris.
As in past years, I am going to visit some of these events as a speaker
(typically 3-4 events). Its a great learning experience, a wonderful
way to interact with a typically younger crowd and understand the
developer thinking from outside the Sun box . And in a modest way, I am
happy to help educate the community on Sun's developer technologies,
priorities and focus.

Tech Days are your opportunity to hear
from and meet
with some of the
brightest engineers from around the world. It's an chance to network
with your
peers, understand more about what's going on from Sun and the industry
and all in a local environment.

Tuesday Sep 02, 2008

Last month, I officially completed my 20 years at Sun!
On such a momentous occasion (in retrospect, tho nothing about it felt momentous on a day-to-day basis), its hard to put all my thoughts and experiences in a few words (or in any words at all). The best I can say is "its been a great ride and I've enjoyed the ups and downs" .
This particular down period seems a lot more drawn out and troubling, but the enormous talent and ability of the people all around me gives me so much hope.
I hope the next 20 are somewhere near as interesting as the past 20 were!

Thursday Aug 21, 2008

Day 2 (and for me, final day, I cant go back for Day 3) had a different flavor to it. I was glad to see how much work Intel is encouraging in the direction of parallel programming. Among the more interesting sessions was an Academic Roundtable on Multicore programming. With participants from Intel College, Tom Murphy of Contra Costa College (a local community college) and Dan Garcia from UC-Berkeley, the discussion centered around how little the academic community was doing to promote/teach parallel programming to incoming entrants. It is clear that future development will need designers and architects, not to mention implementation engineers, to clearly understand principles of parallel programming. A tidbit of interest was that the general survey of university curriculum indicates that most parallel programming teaching is limited to a 6-hour section as part of an OS course!
There was plenty of talk (at the roundtable) about OpenMP and MPI and automatic parallelism, but a couple of other observations particularly stuck out in my mind. One was the appreciation for lack of testing tools (ie. How I do know that the parallel program I have written is correct?) . The non-deterministic nature of this problem is perhaps the most troubling. Another was the observation by UCB faculty that they are thinking about this problem as a many-core problem, not just a multi-core problem (meaning, its not limited to 2, 4, 8 or 16 cores, but to 1000s of cores) and that scale brings its own unique challenges in thinking.
A final point of interest was how little attention academia has generally provided over the virtues of programming for performance of which multi-core programming is but one aspect (I disagree with this sentiment but I could see several heads nodding in agreement and it is a significant viewpoint).
Tough topics to deal with... lets see how the academic community tackles these over the next few years. Otherwise, the burden of this training will fall squarely on the shoulders of employers. See
here for more details .
On other topics, I noticed that interests were largely around the upcoming Nehalem chip architecture, power issues, visual computing challenges and opportunities and platform virtualization.
This was also a great opportunity to network with friends from both Intel and Sun!

Monday Aug 27, 2007

Sun Microsystems started trading under a new Ticker symbol JAVA. This has, of course, been a hot topic for the past few days since Sun announced it and
Jonathan Schwartz, our CEO, blogged about it.
The engineers who have opined on it have generally been down on the move, reflecting much of blogdom (and the unusually high number of comments Jonathan's blog entry has attracted)... and thats putting it mildly . But time will tell if this move brought the awareness and openings that it was intended for. Ultimately, if it ranks alongside the The Network is the Computer slogan that helped identify SUNW's place, it would be a good measure of success.
Meanwhile, not all the sentiment out there is negative.
Heres an independent view of this, from
BusinessWeek this morning . Interesting and pretty neutral take.

PS. For those of you concerned that googling for SUNW just got harder, yes, it did. Just remember, the new string to search for is NASDAQ:JAVA . Neutrally speaking, the W in SUNW had gotten redundant lately and was turned into WorldWide from Workstation, anyway.

Tuesday Dec 12, 2006

I would recommend this article in a recent BusinessWeek (Nov 27, 2006
Edition)Mistakes Made On The Road To
Innovation
Its a wonderful read. It covers Kodak's attempt to transform itself
from an old-line
film and print in its DNA kind of company to a digital media powerhouse. It thought
it could do so by relying on the one tradition it was extremely proud
of, in its 120 year history: that technology
innovation can reinvent the company and the marketplace. As it is now discovering, the
tougher challenge lies in switching business models, which are far more
complex and messy.
Its not clear that Kodak will be able to make the transformation; the
jury is still out and it still teeters
on the precipice.
The article ends with some sagely advice: All innovation is
hard. Reinventing your entire business is the hardest innovation
of all.

Monday Aug 07, 2006

As you have probably seen by now, parts of Sun
(many of the geos, though not all, at this point) underwent the
rightsizing exercise last Thursday that Sun
had announced at year-end earnings announcement . The analyst
industry had picked up on this quite prominently at the time,
like this citation. The promise from executives was a
reduction in headcount to create a lowered breakeven point so that Sun
can be put right back onto a path of sustained, attractive, ongoing
profitability, with increased mindshare, adoption and market share penetration that
will position Sun for future growth.
As you can imagine, this is a VERY difficult exercise. For Sun, as a
business, its a tradeoff between

Sustained and attractive profitability, which means the layoffs
shouldnt exceed the investment threshold we need for comfortable future
growth opportunities

Is Software a profit center, which it can be, or provide fuel for
future growth and Sun Microsystems revenue

As an employee-centric company, laying off too many is both
irresponsible and discouraging to the morale of those left behind

Getting enough costs out of the system so Sun doesnt have to go
through a cycle of layoffs, take charges, recover, re-evaluate newer,
lower breakeven point

As hard as this itself is, theres something even harder: RIF (Reduction
in Force), layoffs, rightsizing, whatever you want to call it, is first
and foremost about people. And in many, many cases, it is about having
to let go employees who arent ready to make the transition. For
managers, and having gone through this process before I can say with
full conviction, this is the hardest thing they will ever have done.
Sitting across the desk from an employee or colleague whom you dearly
respect and whose professionalism, talent, ability and workstyle you
have admired over the years and telling them that Sun can no longer
afford to have them onboard, is an unforgettable experience. For other
employees, who have to replan midcourse, pick up the workload and
responsibilities and continue to deliver to the expectations of the
customers is a challenging adjustment and stressful exercise. But most
of all, its unbelievably hard on the employees who get the
surprise announcement. It upsets their life, it upsets their
family and it upsets their career
plans. It is the hardest transition they will ever make.

As much as I hope this layoff is the last one for Sun for business
reasons and that we can be back on path of sustained profitability and
predictable, delivered growth, I hope equally that those who were let
go in this period discover their own ways of landing back on their feet
and moving their professional careers to the next level. And with it,
their family and life plans. Good luck to you in your future
pursuits,Sun alumni! You belong to a
group that the rest of us immensely admire and I hope that we will
continue to be friends and that our paths will meet again.

About

I have worked with Sun and Oracle for 25 years now; in compilers and tools organization for most of these years followed by a couple of years in Cloud Computing.
I am now in ISV Engineering, where our primary task is to improve synergy between Oracle Sun Systems and our rich ISV ecosystem